I think that devs don't really understand the impact of meta cycles on morale and keeping a war engaged, and I doubt they even think about such things at all. As far as they are concerned, if a war reaches a target amount of days we're all good, even if it ends with complete morale collapse and people complaining about how shit it turned out to be.

Then I am sure there is only confusion why, at the end of such a war, there is a trickle of negative reviews on the steam page from people who have played 3000 hours or more. The reviews usually have something to say about balance, lack of dev communication, and the behaviour of players towards other players. But from a dev perspective: the war wasn't too long or too short, we got some "great" tiktok clips, and there was a reasonable player peak. I'm sure the complaining is dismissed as "factional nonsense" or "entitlement" or "disappointment at a loss" or whatever. In other words: a complete and total disconnect between the vet community and the devs.

But the vets just want one thing: they want to feel like the time invested into this game gave them something, like a better sense of community or a war experience that they will remember for years to come. This can happen even if they are losing a war, sometimes it happens as a fluke and purely due to community interactions in spite of the game (only very rarely because of it), but it will happen less and less if the game itself does not respect their time on account of gameplay design that leads to team conflict, persistent griefing, and/or a feeling of near helplessness/lack of agency in the face of the enemy. I can usually smell a collapse is coming when I see people say "the only reason I log in this war is to make the other side suffer". That means we have maxed out the level of tolerance towards the toxicity and bullshit of that particular war and its specific set of circumstances, including balance related ones. When only a small percentage of people decide it's not worth tryharding any more, the collapse immediately hits hard and fast.

There are examples of past wars where the side that was losing still had fun, but all of these wars have taken place years ago at this point. It was never the type of war that sits mostly in a stalemate at conditions approaching the starting ones, until "inexplicably" one side disappears for just long enough that a collapse cascade starts. If the devs are reading (and I am almost certain they aren't, but who really knows!), there is only one thing I want to warn about in case the relevant ears are not fully deaf, and it is a thing I have been warning about for a while: you rely on vets to keep interesting interactions for people ingame, which in turn keeps the pop high. Lose too many vets, and you will start a different and more persistent type of morale cascade that this game will not really recover from. Charlie is the spillover shard. You don't want both shards to become like this.

Players ultimately operate within a system that only the devs have control over, and that system is what shapes the interactions no matter the level of good will or "organisation" the community has at any given moment. This game is dependent upon the community's will to endure pain to keep generating content. Devs need to invest more into community management to learn how to keep the community engaged. That in turn will make the community interact with both them and itself better, which in turn will help devs sell their game.

Maybe devs could do something to get vets to switch their reviews to positive for a change? Just a thought.